The Money Makers (21 page)

‘Lovely,’ said Helen. ‘Thank you.’

Zack acknowledged his mother’s thanks with a minuscule smile. ‘I’ve got something for you too, Josie.’

Zack poured out the contents of his bag on to his lap. There was a shirt from Pinks, three Hermes ties and a silk scarf, also from Hermes. Zack passed the scarf over to Josephine. She shook it out to see the design, then knotted it round her shoulders. It was gorgeous and suited her well.

‘It’s beautiful, Zack. Thanks.’

‘You’re welcome.’

Josie looked at the pile of goods still on Zack’s lap. He’d remembered to take the price off the scarf, but he hadn’t bothered with his ties, and the tags made their discreet little boasts as clearly as if they’d used trumpets. Fifty pounds each. The shirt would be another forty or fifty, minimum.

‘It is beautiful, Zack, but ... well, if you ever have any spare cash, Mum and I could really use it. The daycare’s really expensive.’

‘Oh Christ, you’re not going to start whingeing, are you?’ Zack was tired.

‘No. I am not going to start whingeing,’ said Josie angrily. ‘It isn’t -’

‘I come out of my way to get here -’

‘Heathrow to Kilburn by taxi. That’s hardly a pilgrimage-’

‘I give you some bloody nice presents and all you can do -’ ·

‘Things aren’t easy and -’

‘Oh that’s right. It’s not easy being a secretary. First you’ve got to paint your nails, then it’s gossiping in the Ladies, then what? A bit of strenuous photocopying?’

‘Stop it.’ Josie was white-faced. She didn’t want to hear this from Zack. She was an eighteen-year-old girl coping well with a difficult world, and being angry at Zack would use up more energy than she had to spare.

‘Stop it!’

‘And Mum. Playing nursery games with a middle­aged woman. That must really strain the brain cells.’ Zack got up to go. Josephine was crying, hot tears burning her cheeks. She was furious with Zack and furious with herself for letting him get to her.

‘Get out.’

‘I’m going. I’ve got work to do. Real work. Work for adults.’

‘Get out.’

Josephine half-shoved her brother out of the front door, sobbing without restraint now. Damn him. Damn him! She wiped her eyes on the Hermes silk. No one was allowed to talk to her like that. No one.

Spring 1999

Spring doesn’t mean much on Wall Street. January is traditionally a good month for the stockmarket, as fools forget the lessons of the year before and rush in optimistically with minds as blank as new-minted chequebooks. But that’s January. By February, the holiday season is long over. The bonuses have been cashed and saved, or committed to boring but sensible projects like the kids’ education, or paying down the mortgage, or refurbishing the yacht. The markets are busy and serious. Corporate financiers work crazy hours on mega-deals which will cause job losses in Wichita and giant bonuses on Wall Street. By March, people are already looking ahead. Will I meet my revenue target? Will the markets let me keep the profit I’ve made? What bonus will I get this time around?

On the training course, the students are tense and unhappy. They don’t want bonuses. They want jobs. It is 4 March 1999. There are 862 days to go until Bernard Gradley’s deadline.

1

Somewhere below Wall Street, the Consolidated Edison Power Company had a problem. Even now, on the cusp of the millennium, New York’s buildings are heated by steam carried through Con-Ed’s network of underground pipes. Most of the time the system works but, as with all old things, from time to time things go wrong. Today was one of those times.

A large vertical pipe, placed like a chimney in the street, belched forth torrents of steam. Beneath it, work­ men scurried round an open manhole.

To the commuters emerging from the subway at the top of Wall Street, the scene was like something from the Civil War. Behind them a blackened church spoke of God and duty. Before them, in a dazzle of morning sun, clouds of steam, like gun smoke, filled the deep canyon of the street. You could just about see as far as the former Federal Reserve where old man Washington still presides, an iron statue on his stone pedestal. Beyond that, nothing but dense smoke and blinding sunlight. Amidst the clouds, here and there, a few flags flew - the Stars and Stripes by the dawn’s early light. The commuters hurrying to work could have been the defeated in flight or the victors on the rampage. Matthew moistened his lips.

This was Wall Street. The most famous street on earth. More money moved down this short alleyway than any finance minister in the world had under his control. Here was wealth. Here was power. Here was everything.

Matthew was ready for it all. He bought a coffee from one of the stalls lining Wall Street and walked on into Madison’s glittering skyscraper. Above his head as he entered, the Stars and Stripes fluttered in the billowing steam.

Today was the day of the final, critical trading game: sixty-three students fighting for five jobs. Matthew was nervous but excited. He enjoyed the games and was good at them. And this time he began with an advantage, the advantage of having read and memorised the binder he’d found in Gillian McCutcheon’s office.

If the binder was right, the game they were about to play was different from all the others they had played so far. Instead of bonds or shares, the students were to trade lottery tickets. Each student would start with a thousand tickets. Each ticket would offer the chance to compete in a lottery with a theoretical million dollar prize. Various news items, each of which had been spelled out in an appendix, would be released throughout the game. The price of the lottery tickets would, of course, go up and down as the market digested the new information.

Every trader dreams of knowing the future. If you only knew one stupid statistic each day - say the price of the US government long bond - you could forget your big house in Long Island and go buy yourself an island someplace sunny. Give yourself time and you could trade up again, from an island to a country, from a country to a continent. Today, just for the day, Matthew knew the future.

The binder didn’t give him the price of lottery tickets, but it gave him something just as good. In previous games there wasn’t a right answer to where prices should be; there was only the answer of the market. In this game, however, you could work out the price a lottery ticket ought to have by simple maths. For instance, if there were a million lottery tickets in circulation, competing for a single million dollar prize, each ticket was worth $1 exactly. If you could buy a ticket at 99.92 cents you were getting a bargain. If you sold a ticket at $1.002, you were making a profit.

So, early in the mornings while Sophie slept, Matthew sat over his notes, calculating to the nearest sixteenth of a cent how prices ought to move. He made himself practise the calculations again and again. He timed himself for speed and set himself ever more complex puzzles. He was not going to allow himself to be caught out. This was his chance.

Sophie came in and slid alongside Matthew at his desk. Usually they had breakfast together, but not today. Matthew was too preoccupied.

‘You look nervous,
mon cher’,
said Sophie.

‘Yeah. I do feel queasy. You look alright.’

As ever with Sophie, this was an understatement. She wore an ash-grey suit with green trim and a brilliant white silk blouse beneath. Her skirt would have been considered conservative, almost frumpy, in the daringly dressed Paris office. Here in New York, however, she showed a length of leg that her American coursemates exposed only in the shower. Her complexion glowed with health and there wasn’t a glimmer of uncertainty in her bearing. Matthew felt bad about his secret, but he knew Sophie wouldn’t cheat with him and it was too late to confide in her now.

Sophie kissed him.

‘Don’t worry, dearest. You’ll do fine. Either you win and get your precious job or you don’t win, don’t get the job, and get another one just as good next year. Either way you’ll be fine. What difference does a year make?’

‘More than you think,’ said Matthew grumpily.

Sophie tugged his hair in mock rebuke.

‘You’re twenty-two, you
imbecile.
You could always go back and finish your degree, you know. I don’t much care for uneducated men.’

‘And if you lose?’

‘Que sera, sera.
I’ll do something else.’

‘It’s alright for you. Supermodel. Movie star. Financial mogul. The world’s your oyster.’

‘Don’t mention oysters. They make me come over all sexy.’

The conversation descended into lovers’ nonsense. And as the time came to move through into the big conference room where the game was due to begin, Matthew was certain of only two things. The first thing was that he desperately wanted a job at Madison. The second was that he had never felt about a woman the way he felt about Sophie.

The students assembled. Half of them were obviously nervous. The other half were either resigned -like Princess Fareshti, who seemed on the verge of sleep already - or, like Sophie and Scott Petersen, were apparently immune to nerves. The enviable Diego Burelli, soon to take up his new job in Buenos Aires, cracked jokes in Spanish on his mobile phone as Matthew’s nerves danced the jitterbug.

Gillian McCutcheon was already there, as were a scattering of senior traders, there to inspect the proceedings.

‘That’s Coniston, isn’t it? Head of the corporate fixed income desk.’

‘And that woman next to him. Maria Hernandez. The junk bond queen.’

To the students trembling for their future, the ordinary­looking figures of Fred Coniston and Maria Hernandez were like gods descended to earth. Gillian McCutcheon began to outline the game.

‘Unlike previous games, you will not be trading financial instruments. You will be trading lottery tickets. Each of you will own a thousand lottery tickets to begin with. Each ticket gives you a one in a million chance to win a jackpot worth a million dollars.’

She rambled on. It was exactly what Matthew had been expecting. Exact to the details of the wording. His tiny fear that his precious document would prove to be misleading vanished. He really did know the future. The game got underway, and the first news announcement went up. Lottery fraud in Wisconsin, murmured Matthew under his breath. Five thousand tickets scrapped. Sure enough, the placard announced that a counterfeit ring had been exposed in Wisconsin. Five thousand tickets were being impounded.

Matthew knew the prices he should be quoting. He pretended to do a calculation to check, but he was quick to position himself in the middle of the throng. He sang out his prices and asked others for theirs. It was a rule of the game that everybody had to quote a price when asked and had to stick to their quote if the other person wanted to deal. That meant there was nowhere to hide. You couldn’t simply sit in a comer and keep your head down. In fact, there could hardly be a worse strategy. You might as well string a balloon round your neck saying ‘I’m a sucker - please take advantage’. Everyone would cluster round you, ask you for your prices and hit your bid every time you offered to buy high or sell low.

Matthew liked to be asked for his prices. He knew his prices included a profit margin whether he was buying or selling, and the more trades he did, the more money he made. But he was even happier when he was able to ask others for their prices. He sought out the least able students, asked their prices and bought or sold in bulk whenever he spotted an opportunity. He dived around the room seeking out ignorance and profiting.

Then at his shoulder a familiar voice whispered,
‘Bonjour, Monsieur Gradley.
Your prices, please?’

He turned and found himself looking into Sophie’s ever-beautiful face.

‘To anyone else, I’d sell at eighty-eight, buy at eighty­seven,’ he said. ‘But you, my dear, can have all the lottery tickets in the world for a dollar and a kiss.’

Matthew tore out a trading ticket for her. He signed it and left the rest for her to fill in. It was a blank cheque. If she wanted to buy all of Matthew’s tickets for a penny, she only had to fill out the ticket. His signature would authenticate the trade beyond dispute.

Sophie raised her eyebrows and filled the ticket out with mock seriousness:

Trader’s name:
Matthew Gradley

Type of deal:
Sell

Buyer/seller:
Sophie Clemenceau

Number of units:
10,000

Price per unit:
$0.01

Total deal value:
$100

Deal time:
09.46

The ticket stated that Matthew was selling Sophie ten thousand tickets at one cent each. If Sophie chose to enforce the deal, Matthew would be bankrupted out of the game, dead in the water. Not even Fareshti Al Shahrani would be able to lose that much money.

‘Voila,’
said Sophie. ‘That should put paid to your ambition.’ So saying she stepped close to Matthew, where no one but they could see what happened next. She threaded the ticket between the buttons at the front of her shirt, and tucked the ticket into her bra. It was a snug fit. ‘You can take it back, if you wish,’ she murmured.